[ Type 1 Russian AK ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgottenweapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and we have a very cool
AK to take a look at today, this is a Type 1 AK.
These were only made for a few years before
the substantial problems with them
lead to a significant redesign of the AK.
Now, if we roll back the clock here to the original development of the AK.
It was in 1947 that the design was finalised and approved and supposed to start production.
Production didn't actually begin until early 1948, and it began at a factory in Izhevsk.
Now, that wasn't one of the major Russian arms ... factories.
I believe it had been involved in ... Maxim gun production during World War Two.
And ... in fact the reason that it was chosen for this
is it didn't have any really big name Russian arms designers based there.
So, most of the other big arms factories like Tula or Kovrov
had kind of in-house designers, guys like Degtyarev and Fedorov.
And Kalashnikov was this kind of young upstart designer,
and it wasn't really all that practical for him to try and shoehorn
his new operation into one of these existing factory bureaucracy hierarchies.
So they instead sent him to Izhevsk where there weren't any real big-name designers,
but there were a lot of very good engineers and technical specialists.
And so it was kind of an ideal location to start production
on a brand new weapons family, the Kalashnikov.
Anyway, in early 1948 he produces the first 4 pre-production AKs,
and those each go through some endurance testing.
Apparently it was like just over 13,000 rounds each,
because that was the totality of the ammunition they had available at the time.
And the guns did really quite well. These of course are handmade, hand fitted, pre-production guns.
And they did well enough that of course full-scale production began.
And by the end of 1949 they'd made something like 80,000 of these rifles.
Things were going OK, they had a lot of guns coming out.
The problem is QC was an issue: quality control.
This rifle has a stamped sheet-metal receiver.
That was one of the original fundamental ideas of the Kalashnikov,
following on several other World War Two Soviet designs that did that,
like the Sudayev submachine gun, the PPS-43.
They wanted to continue that, it's an economical and efficient sort of production methodology.
The problem was the sheet metal used on the AK is much lighter gauge ...
and has higher requirements for accuracy and tolerance and clearance.
It's harder to make, in short, than something like a PPS-43 and they had trouble doing it.
They weren't able to sufficiently guarantee the inside dimensions of the receiver.
The receivers ... had a tendency to warp when they got hot.
There was, in short, a very high reject rate on AK receivers and this was a problem.
The whole idea of a stamped receiver is that
you can crank out a gazillion of them once you've got the tooling going.
Well, if your quality control is a problem and you have a lot of them that you have to throw away,
that kind of negates the whole benefit of having that stamping production in the first place.
So in 1949 they actually developed an alternative new receiver for the AK.
That is known by collectors and historians today as the Type 2 AK.
It is basically what we would know today as the milled AK receiver.
And so what they did was abandon the whole stamping idea,
and instead drop forge and machine a solid metal block for the receiver of the AK - that worked!
Now it had some downsides, it was more expensive, it was substantially heavier.
But they didn't have the quality control problems that they'd had with this first version.
So for a couple of years, through to the end of 1951,
... Izhevsk continued to manufacture these early stamped guns
at the same time that they were making in parallel the milled receiver guns.
And by '51 the milled guns were up and running and everything was working well,
and they finally shut down production of the original AK-47.
So these guns were only in production for three years,
from the very beginning in 1948 through to about the end of 1951.
There weren't a whole lot made in the first place, and there are very few of them surviving today.
Now it looks from back there mostly like a normal AK,
but there are ... a few substantial differences and there are a lot of little minor differences.
So, let's pull this guy apart and I will show you
what the inside of a Type 1 AK receiver actually looks like.
Let me begin by pointing out the magazine that is in this gun is what's called a "slab side" AK mag.
This was the original design for the AK magazine, 30 rounds, that never changed.
But it doesn't have the reinforcing ribs stamped in it,
instead it is made of a heavier gauge steel.
So it's a quite durable mag, but it's also a really remarkably heavy magazine.
Even the modern stamped ribbed AK mag is a fairly heavy piece of equipment, this one is even more so.
Anyway, we will set this aside.
If you look at a Type 1 AK, there are really two main things that are ...
distinctive visual elements to the gun that allow you to easily identify it.
One of them is this raised section of the stamped receiver here.
That looks kind of like what you see in some milled guns, but it's really not the same.
The other is the shape of the pistol grip. The rest of the furniture didn't substantially change.
... It is specific to each individual model, but really it's all pretty much the same shape.
The pistol grip however did substantially change, you'll notice it has a more rearward slanted angle.
And it is larger front to back than ... any of the standard AK grips that would follow.
Looking at the other side here you can notice that there is this reinforcing rib
stamped into the receiver which you will not see on any later guns.
And you'll also notice that ... you don't have spot welds that are nearly as visible,
and the rivet pattern is rather different on these than it would be on the later stamped guns.
So we'll look at that a little more closely in a moment, but first the markings.
Markings on a Type 1 are really often pretty crude looking, and this is a good example of that.
There was originally an Izhevsk factory code mark here.
That would be an arrow pointing upward inside a triangle,
you can see the remnants of that but it is mostly worn away.
The serial number is right here, and that's ... four numerals
with a two letter suffix, and those are Cyrillic letters.
And then the date here. ... What looks sort of like a lowercase "r"
is a Russian character ... standing for "year". So this is a 1951 production gun.
From what I have seen, the majority of the surviving ones are some of those later guns.
That was the last year that these were produced.
The other typical place you will find markings on an AK are the selector markings.
And this is no exception, so we have our full-auto and semi-auto selector markings there.
Pretty close to the same positions as a later pattern AK, but not quite identical.
And you'll notice there is another stamped reinforcing rib right here,
as well as one behind the safety.
You can see a couple of rivets here that are used to hold the rear trunnion in place.
And you can see ... the edge of the rear trunnion right there.
These instead of being left domed have been ground down, that's standard.
So it makes it a little more ... difficult to identify but at the same time,
once you know what you're looking at, it makes it a little easier to identify.
There are some minor changes to the Type 1, like the gas vent holes up here at the front.
You'll notice these are exactly at the horizontal, 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock.
On the Type 2 these holes would be moved to be at more like 10 and 2 o'clock, slightly elevated up here.
These aren't really substantive changes, but they are those little details
that let you identify Type 1 parts from others.
Disassembly is exactly the same as a regular AK.
The actual operating mechanism is identical to ... all of the more modern iterations of the AK.
However before we pull this apart, I will point out that the little spring retaining tab
back here that holds the dust cover on - a little bit different shape.
So, as normal we'll push that in, pop off the top cover.
Then pull out the spring guide.
Drop the safety, and then just like every other AK we can pull out the bolt carrier and bolt.
Note that the gas piston here is fluted,
again just a little detail difference from some of the later patterns.
The business end of the bolt carrier though is pretty much the same.
Certainly it's mechanically identical. As is the bolt.
And yes, this one has been fired quite a lot.
Alright, but the bit you want to see is inside the receiver, so here we go.
Couple of things to notice. For one there is no centre support rivet in this receiver.
Normally with a regular AK receiver you'd have a rivet right around here
that just spans across the receiver and strengthens it.
Prevents it from getting dented, holds it in its configuration.
That was something that would be added with the AKM, and it is conspicuously absent on these early guns.
That's I expect a substantial part of why they were not so reliable in their shape.
The front trunnion is somewhat differently shaped.
If we look in here you can see that the front trunnion
comes back a lot further than it does on a more modern AK.
With the AKM the trunnion pretty much ended at the end of this reinforcement.
On this, these are two of the rivets that are holding the trunnion into the sheet metal receiver.
The trunnion also overlaps the receiver up here at the front,
so you can kind of see that right here.
So that's the trunnion there, and it comes up and over.
We have a barrel pin there to lock the barrel in place.
On these the barrels are actually threaded into the front trunnion.
On the AKM they would change that to a press fit, and then a pin to hold them in place.
The shape of the ejector block here is a little different.
And the ejector is actually part of the trunnion instead of being
its own separate welded in rail as it would be on the AKM.
The rail is just this short little extension right there,
and you can see the two rivets that hold it in place.
Those rivets have been round down nice and flush so that you cannot see them.
The safety lever is from the outside basically the same as every other AK.
On the inside you'll note that it does not go across.
So on ... an AKM there is a pin hole over here that is the opposite side of the safety.
On the original Type 1s the safety is actually a non-removable part.
So you can see it acting inside there, no way to take it out.
And again, like the lack of a centre rivet, on an AKM you have a little bit of support
from the safety spanning across the receiver, you don't get that with the Type 1.
Now you can see two rivets down there, those are for the pistol grip.
(I went ahead and loosen this screw.) On the modern AKM the pistol grip just sits up here
and then there's a retaining block and a very long screw
that comes all the way down and tightens in the bottom.
On the Type 1 instead they put a tab for the pistol grip,
basically a skeleton for the pistol grip.
It is riveted into the bottom of the receiver, much like the trigger guard is.
So the grips then have a moulded cavity.
These are moulded plastic, they may be Bakelite, I think they're some sort of plastic fibre material.
And they've got anyway a moulded slot for that centre support to go down right in the middle.
They fit on just like that.
On the opposite side of the receiver we have another reinforcing rail there.
Like the later AKM right side rail, it does go down and it does act to reinforce the hammer pin.
Of course, the hammer is ... going to be the part that probably is putting the most
force on the receiver because ... it's slamming back and forth with a pretty heavy spring behind it.
So using this rail as a second layer of steel
to reinforce its receiver interface is a good idea.
That rail is also held in place by two little rivets there.
... Well, you can't see them because they are ground flush up in there.
The rear trunnion is kind of a blind socket here.
On the AKM this would be open, on this one it is closed.
It's held in place by three cross rivets that you can just barely see there, one, two and three.
And then ... the rear trunnion has both a lower and an upper tang that come off to secure the stock.
So when they went to the AKM they got rid of the lower tang, and just had the upper tang.
You still have the trap in the buttstock for a cleaning kit though.
Early on there was some theorising that a lot of this production change
had also been due to problems with the rivets or the welds connecting things
like the front and rear trunnions to the sheet metal receiver, that appears to not be the case.
There are some folks who've been able to examine a number of surviving Type 1s,
and none of them show any sort of fatigue of that type.
Instead it really does appear to have been a quality control issue.
... There were, by the way, two versions of the milled receiver.
There was the early Type 2, and then they kind of ... made a few changes
and standardised on what's called the Type 3 milled receiver.
Which is the one that we see ... when you look at milled receiver AKs from a variety of countries,
it's pretty much always a Type 3 receiver that they're using.
... They were continuing to try and work on the stamping technology.
And this is the area where I think some of the German expertise that they had,
[NB, this theory is disputed ...]
guys like Schmeisser, who were interned in Russia after the war
and worked for the Russian arms program. I think one of the big areas
where they were able to actually help the Russian arms industry
was ... figuring out how to do this sort of more complex stamping procedure.
And finally in 1959 they got it worked out,
and they reintroduce the stamped receiver AK as the AKM (or modernised).
And that is the standard stamped receiver AK that you see today.
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